Mind, Body & Leadership: the founder’s wellbeing
There’s a question most founders never get to answer in front of peers: how are you?
On May 7th, Endeavor Italy gathered a community of founders at Villa Piceni, a 19th-century estate on the shores of Lake Maggiore, for a day built around the idea that the person behind the company deserves as much attention as the company itself.
Energy, not time
Stefano Portu, Co-founder & CEO of Shopfully opened with a confession: for most of his career, he believed the answer to every challenge was going harder. Then he realized he had become the bottleneck of his own company.
“How many times have you looked at the same problem in two different moments of the day? In one, it feels like a death sentence. In the other, a great challenge. The only thing that changed is your energy level.”
The scarce resource isn’t time. It’s energy. And optimism is a strategic asset that requires active management. The system he built to protect it? A shared personal assistant to manage his calendar including personal commitments, sport twice a day, breakfast and dinner with his kids as non-negotiables, and a Monday guitar lesson scheduled with the same rigor as a board meeting.
“Not a trade-off between work and personal life, but how to be the best version of yourself in both.”
Scaling yourself
Danila De Stefano, CEO & Founder of Unobravo, put it plainly: companies have dashboards, founders don’t. There are KPIs for revenue and runway. There are none for whether the person leading the company is still growing alongside it.
“What got you here is not necessarily what will take you forward.”
The transition from doer to decision-maker requires unlearning patterns that felt like identity. Danila was candid about the hardest parts – letting go of people who were there from the start, making decisions that hurt. Her framework: your company grows at the speed of your decisions. Anything that clouds those decisions is ultimately a company-level problem.
“If we avoid conflict, the company avoids conflict. If we don’t raise the bar, even the outliers will adapt downward.”
The body as infrastructure
Teresa Budetta, Founder of Avea Life, and Giacomo Spazzini, Founder & CEO of GS Loft, brought the conversation into territory most business events don’t touch: the biology of sustainable performance.
Only 25% of how we age is genetic. The remaining 75% is epigenetics – the choices we make today, repeated over time. Giacomo walked the room through a practical framework: resistance training, zone 2 cardio, sleep, and emotional health. Sleeping less than six hours a night for a week reduces testosterone by 20%, immune response by 30%, increases cortisol by 15%.
“The muscle is the longevity organ. Not for aesthetics, but because it regulates metabolism and shapes how we age. The goal isn’t a 30-day protocol. It’s habits you can hold for 30 years.”
On leadership and the people around you
In an intimate session moderated by Marco Rampazzo, Managing Director of Endeavor Italy, Giorgio Chiellini, Director of Football Strategy at Juventus, spoke not as an icon, but as someone genuinely figuring out his second act.
He quoted a distinction from coach Marcello Lippi: the fuoriclasse isn’t technically superior, it’s the leader who makes everyone around them better. The secret to managing 25 people from different cultures and backgrounds is focus on their strengths and genuinely stop caring about their weaknesses.
On the matter of pressure, he said his turning point was personal: the birth of his daughters.
“What a daughter gives you, no trophy can.”
Ambition without an exit ramp
Duccio Vitali, Founder & CEO of Alkemy, distilled his formula: 15% talent, 35% emotional intelligence, 50% determination.
“If everyone believes in it, it’s not ambitious enough.”
Goals need to be vivid enough to pull you forward when the path disappears, and don’t give yourself the option to quit. Not because resilience is noble, but because the moment stopping becomes valid, you’ve already started stopping.
He was equally clear about what he called “the two mountains”. The first is the professional goal. But if you haven’t built the second one – family, friendships, sport, other passions – you reach the top and find yourself asking “so what?”
“The idea is that sacrificing everything else gets you better results… but it doesn’t.”
What Endeavor believes
This is what a community built on the pay-it-forward principle looks like in practice: a place where founders who have already climbed certain mountains sit alongside those who are mid-ascent and share what they actually know.